The Open Access Movement, Repositories, and More

Abstract

Open access is a cost-effective way to disseminate and use information. It permits users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to full texts, crawl for indexing, pass them as data or use them for any lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers. OA operates within current legal framework of copyright law. It is intended to be free for readers, not for producers. OA focuses on academic research, has peer review. Three broad movements are described. 1. Disciplinary repositories are used by certain academic disciplines to facilitate sharing and storage of research materials. These repositories ("e-print servers") have high rates of participation in their respective fields. Repositories exist in such disciplines as classical literature, history of philosophy, economics, chemistry, cognitive sciences, mathematics, and physics. 2. Institutional repositories are digital archives of intellectual products created by the faculty, staff, and students of an institution and accessible to end users both within and without the institution, with few if any barriers to access. 3. Self-archiving is the depositing by the author of a digital document in a publicly accessible institutional or disciplinary repository via a web site. Includes articles and preprints by individual researchers.